It’s 1994, and a book called Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, has just been published. This book features a chapter titled Black to the Future, in which author Mark Dery examines how in speculative or science fiction, imagined future technologies are sometimes portrayed as creating newly liberated existences for people of African heritage. Dery defines this perspective as Afrofuturist, a concept that will soon become relevant to the techno and associated electronic music being made by almost exclusively black artists in Detroit. This is especially true for the tracks of one such artist, Drexciya, which conceive of a deep-sea environment in which the offspring of Africans who drowned during the transatlantic slave trade, live in a high-tech world of freedom and tranquillity underwater. Drexciya’s techno during the 1990s, constructs the idea of this submerged civilisation, through the watery imagery of tracks such as “Neon Falls”.

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